


indiscretions

by earnshaws



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: Abuse of Caffeinated Stimulants, Canon Compliant, F/F, Getting Together, P.R. Shenanigans, Politics, Vaginal Fingering, ish, unhealthy sleep habits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-27 19:42:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17773049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earnshaws/pseuds/earnshaws
Summary: “Fuck yes it is,” Selina says, downing the contents of the shitty little travel cup in a single gulp. (Also a bad sign: Selina drinking coffee like she’s taking shots.) “I’m the Vice President of the United States. They should be writing about my policies, what I’m doing, not whatever little idiot I choose to stick my dick in on my downtime.” Selina tosses the coffee cup into the trash. “As it were.”(Or: Selina gets into some P.R. hot water, and Amy's responsible for picking up the pieces.)





	indiscretions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstlovelatespring](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstlovelatespring/gifts).



Amy’s never kept the most regular of hours, but this is ridiculous even for her.

Like— being up at five in the morning is nothing new. When they were on the campaign trail she would actually spend most of the day, from around ten in the morning to three or fourish in the afternoon, asleep, and then drag herself out of...not bed, usually, but wherever she’d found a place to lay down her weary head, get Selina ready for whatever it was she had that evening, and then work til sunrise. Even now that she lives a slightly (only slightly) less hectic lifestyle, she’ll occasionally find herself on the job through the night, working into the morning and afternoon— but never for more than, like, a day at a time. At a stretch. She’s never been able to go as long without sleep as some of her colleagues, to her eternal chagrin. But still. All-nighters are a must in this business.

So Amy is familiar with five in the morning. She’s become...not fond of it, but grudgingly accepting. Like a shitty roommate you’ve learned to make peace with— you’re stuck together, so you might as well make the best of it. And there are perks to five in the morning in the Veep’s office. It’s quiet, for one; no Dan, no Jonah, no Mike, no Gary, and most importantly, no Selina. One less thing she has to stress about. Without Kent around, there’s no printer queue, and she’s got the kitchenette all to herself. Small victories. Usually, such little triumphs are, if not enjoyable, at least ameliorative. Not today.

Amy has been up for thirty-four hours straight, and despite the amount of caffeine she’s consumed (or because of it, maybe) she could swear that she’s starting to hear colors. The clock on the corner of her laptop ticks from 5:11 to 5:12, and Amy closes her eyes, rubs them with the backs of her palms— her mascara’s gone, thanks to the six times she’d splashed cold water on her face at around two in a desperate attempt to keep herself from nodding off. Her eyes have gone past burning from the light of her computer screen and on a dry, sandy ache that steadily refuses to abate.

It’s this awful fucking _website_. For the— Amy has to struggle for a minute to remember the name, that’s how out of it she is— Green Jobs Initiative. Amy had been a computer science minor in college, though she’d hated every minute of it, and her coding skills were the most passable of anyone on the staff, so Selina had landed her with the last-minute task of fixing a loading glitch that was making the page refuse to appear for people with a certain version of Google Chrome. Or something. Amy is too tired to properly remember. She’s convinced she’s been staring at the same line of HTML for the past fifteen minutes.

Really this is a job for an intern, or— whatever they call the people who normally take care of these things, Amy doesn’t know— but because it was one in the morning when they’d figured it out, and all the lower-downs had gone home to their cozy beds, and this apparently couldn’t wait til the morning because the site had launched yesterday and it was a significant segment of the population with this specific fucking software and they needed to be on top of the Green Jobs Initiative because it was the latest in a long string of crackpot programs Selina had seized upon as her _legacy_ , whatever the fuck _that_ meant—

Christ, she’s tired.

Amy stands up, breathes deep, stretches her arms above her head. It doesn’t help. She briefly considers going for more coffee, but that’ll probably just worsen the ringing in her ears— there comes a point at which caffeine does more harm than good.

She’s contemplating going outside without her coat and hoping the January air will wake her up when she hears the door open.

Amy’s always been...not paranoid, exactly, but suspicious. Too many late-night reruns of SVU, probably. There’s no way anyone without the proper credentials would be able to get into the building, but Selina’s not supposed to be here until seven, and she’s usually the earliest. Amy knows for a fact that neither Mike nor Dan, who both live ten minutes away in the worst of Beltway traffic, get out of bed before eight. She sits back down, cautiously, and tries to focus on the code, at which point there is an absolutely massive crash from the entryway.

“Fuck!” comes Selina’s voice, loud and clear.

Amy sighs, partly out of relief and partly out of exasperation. She stands up again and follows the source of the swearing to her boss’s bent form. Selina’s leaning on the doorframe at the entrance to the bullpen, one heel off, holding her bare foot and wincing as she totters. She’s...dressed, but sloppily, and she looks absolutely exhausted.

“Morning,” she says, almost sheepishly, and Amy is immediately on guard. Selina has greeted her with _sheepishness_ twice at the _most_. That, plus her appearance, plus the showing up at five in the morning— something’s not right.

“What happened?” says Amy warily.

Selina gives her that almost self-deprecating smile. “Hello to you too, Amy.”

Amy grabs her by the arm, ignoring the shattered remains of the vase that had evidently made the crash, and pulls her upright. “Out with it.”

“Christ, all right! At least let me put my shoe on.” Selina winces, fitting her heel over a rapidly swelling stubbed toe. (Right at this instant, Amy can’t find the energy to care if her boss has a broken toe.) She leans on Amy as she hobbles through the bullpen and sits down on an adjoining rolling chair, legs over the back in the way she does when they’re alone.

“So,” says Selina by way of introduction, “you know Mark.”

Amy’s hackles raise. “Mark...the Mark you’ve been sleeping with since September.”

“Yep.” Selina leans back, as if bracing herself. “He, ah— well, he...he wasn’t as. Discreet. As I made it clear to him he needed to be.”

If Amy were more awake, it’s entirely likely that she would have exploded. As it is, she simply closes her eyes, takes a deep breath through her nose, and exhales it through her mouth.

“What _exactly_ ,” she says, eyes still closed, “did he say.”

“I mean, I don’t know, because he didn’t go out and talk to the press per se, he told a friend who told a friend who— you know how the Beltway is, why am I explaining this to you. He thought it would be fine, bless his stupid heart. It was a close buddy of his. Anyway, I got a call at three this morning, from a contact at the _Post_. They’re breaking it first thing tomorrow.”

Breathe in, breathe out. “Okay.”

Selina looks at her cautiously. “Okay?”

“Selina,” says Amy, “I have not slept in almost thirty-six hours. I need you to go get Mike out of bed and have him deal with this.”

“But I came all the way here—” The look on Amy’s face cuts her off. “Okay. Mike. Got it.”

“Thank you.” Amy closes her laptop. At least now the Green Jobs Initiative can wait until tomorrow— the news about the Vice President when day breaks will most certainly not be the incompetence of her tech staff.

Small victories, Amy supposes.

 

* * *

 

FRATERNIZING WITH THE ENEMY?

Vice President Meyer Caught Up In First Scandal Of Term

By Josh Haverford

6:00 AM EST

While her running mate has so far had a tenure largely free of the taint of scandal, Vice President Meyer has not been so lucky. The Post has received word that Meyer is currently involved with Mark Huntington, chief of staff for Congressman Henry Miller.

The affair has been in existence for approximately four months, according to the Post’s source. Neither Meyer nor any of her staff have made any mention of it, possibly owing to the fact that Congressman Miller is a Republican, and a member of the far-right Liberty Caucus in the House— an organization Meyer has been vocally opposed to for her entire public career.

The Post was able to independently verify our source’s claims with people close to both Meyer and Huntington. Neither Meyer nor Huntington could be reached for comment. Meyer’s communications director, Mike McLintock, declined to provide a quote.

Though Meyer is unmarried, having divorced her husband several years previous, her relations across the aisle carried on during a fierce campaign season without her party’s or the public’s knowledge will doubtless mean some tough questions about loyalty and discretion to answer.

 

* * *

 

“Mike,” says Selina, her voice measured in that specific way that means she’s about to start swearing, screaming, or both, “why did you ‘decline to provide a quote’?”

“Well, ma’am,” mumbles Mike, eyes fixed on a spot on the drywall above Selina’s head, “I couldn’t reach you, and I wasn’t sure how you wanted me to spin it, and—”

“You’re my communications director, you useless— shitgibbon!” Selina’s voice rises to a shrill scream on the last word, and Amy winces. (“Shitgibbon” is a new low; usually Selina’s able to come up with something more creative. That she’s resulting to generic insults is a bad sign.) “It’s your fucking job to decide how to spin it! That’s what I pay you for!”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Mike. His eyes are still glued to the drywall.

“And look at me when I’m talking to you,” spits Selina.

Mike meets her glare, and Amy could swear she sees something inside him wither and die from the sheer vitriol of the way she’s looking at him.

“God!” Selina exclaims, turning her attention from Mike (who droops in relief) to the rest of the room, anger radiating off her like the stench of onions and misogyny off Congressman Furlough. “Who fucking wrote this? _Josh Haverford—_ ” she says the name with enough dripping, concentrated contempt to render a hundred acres of Iowa cornfield unfarmable for the next millennium “— Dan, do you know anyone who can make this guy’s life a living hell?”

“Of course, ma’am,” says Dan, with remarkable nonchalance. Amy figures he’s suppressing a grin.

“Good. Get on the phone and make it happen. Christ, look at this. Judgemental asshole. If I—” Selina gestures furiously, if aimlessly— “if I were a man, I’d be able to fuck whoever I fucking wanted. I could hop into bed with a goddamn Nazi, and you’d have this godforsaken piece of shit—” she waves her phone, with the Post article pulled up— “writing thinkpieces about how important it was that I was normalizing working across the aisle. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Completely agree, ma’am,” says Gary timidly, handing her another cup of coffee.

“Actually, ma’am,” Mike says, wincing when her eyes land back on him, “that’s not a bad way to spin it. Minus the Nazi, of course, but we need to focus on how unfair it is that the media is treating you this way.”

“Fuck yes it is,” Selina says, downing the contents of the shitty little travel cup in a single gulp. (Also a bad sign: Selina drinking coffee like she’s taking shots.) “I’m the Vice President of the United States. They should be writing about my policies, what I’m doing, not whatever little idiot I choose to stick my dick in on my downtime.” Selina tosses the coffee cup into the trash. “As it were.”

“Exactly, ma’am.” Mike takes out his phone. “Should I call a press conference?”

“Yes. Fix this.” Selina puts a hand on her forehead and exhales heavily. “Okay, what else?”

“Uh— there’s Mark,” Amy offers. “You should probably talk to him about this.”

“Oh.” Selina looks unpleasantly blindsided by the notion. “Can we—”

“You’re gonna have to drop him,” says Dan. “Sexism spin is fine, but the optics of being publicly together with a Liberty Caucus staffer— I mean, Miller was the guy who said he thought David Duke had some good ideas.”

Selina wrinkled her nose. “Did he really?”

“Back when he was a state rep, but yeah.” Dan sits down on his desk. “And I think Huntington was his campaign manager at that point. So there’s not much to lose, with him.”

Selina bites her lip. “Won’t it make me look like I’m caving to the pressure, dropping him as soon as the story breaks?”

“Better than staying with a guy who works for a Klansman,” says Dan bluntly.

Selina blanches “He isn’t.” She looks to Amy. “Right?”

“He might as well be, considering the press he gets.” Amy stands up, stretching— she’d gotten maybe five hours of sleep on the break room couch, woken up at noon, and promptly consumed enough coffee to give an elephant a heart attack. She’s surprised a sore back is all she’s dealing with. “You wanna do it over the phone?”

Selina looks slightly panicked. “I—”

“It’ll be easier if you don’t have to see his face,” offers Mike. “Trust me, I’ve been there.”

Amy gives him a dirty look before turning her attention back to Selina. “Better yet, text him and then block his number.”

“Oh, that’s terrible. I couldn’t do that.”

Amy bites back a smart remark about the much worse things her boss has done without a single qualm.

“I can do it for you,” offers Dan. “Impersonal as possible. You’ll never have to see him again.”

That’s improbable, thinks Amy. As American cities go, the Beltway is the tiny Appalachian town where every single resident is within three degrees of separation from the same incestuous hillbilly clan. The harder you try to avoid someone, the more likely you are to run into them.

Selina looks unsure, glancing around the bullpen at the members of her team gathered there. “Amy? Can we talk in private?”

Over her years with Selina, Amy has honed what she’s taken to calling her Selina-sense to a point finer than the pass margin in the House of the President’s first banner legislation. To most people who know her beyond the headlines and the interviews and the obsessively-managed social media, the Vice President is an unpredictable tropical storm of a woman, volatile and reckless and frequently by all indications insane. To Amy, though, she’s...slightly more comprehensible. Something about so much time spent in her close proximity, and an intimate understanding of what makes Selina tick, has lent Amy the priceless ability to divine where her head is at, and anticipate what she’s going to do. Dan had nicknamed her the Veep-whisperer early in his tenure, and Amy hated it then and hates it now, but— he wasn’t wrong. More often than not, Amy is the only person who can talk Selina down from the ledge.

Which is by all appearances what she’s going to have to do now.

Amy steels herself. “Of course,” she says crisply, and follows her boss into the office.

Once the door is shut, Selina drops down onto the couch and kicks her shoes off with a long, exhausted sigh. “Jesus Christ,” she groans. “What the fuck am I going to do?”

“Ma’am, with all due respect,” says Amy, “you’re going to dump that man like garbage on the first day after a two-week government shutdown. He’s that toxic.”

“I don’t want to, though,” says Selina, staring up at the crown molding as if it might hold the answer to her predicament. “I haven’t been fucked so well since college.”

Amy sighs, and goes to sit down next to her. “Is that what this is about?”

Selina looks over at her, head still tilted back over the top of the couch cushion, and half-smiles. “Isn’t it ridiculous? I swear, that man’s got a magic penis. Like, I’ve fucked a lot of men, and none—” she gestures emphatically— “none— have even come close.” She laughs ruefully. “No pun intended.”

“So you don’t want to get rid of him because his dick’s too good,” says Amy.

“I know it’s stupid,” says Selina, returning her gaze to the ceiling. “But it helps. Having sex so regularly, I mean. It takes the edge off. Relieves the worst of the stress, you know? I haven’t been smoking so much, and I have more energy. I don’t want to go back to being so...uptight all the time.” She sighs. “Maybe I should just go on, like, Zoloft or something, so I’m not so fucking horny all the time, and I don’t need some idiot staffer who for some inscrutable reason God gifted with the best cock on the Beltway. Christ. I feel so _dumb_.”

“Selina,” says Amy, “you know we could take care of this in-house.”

Selina raises an eyebrow. “Go on.”

By no means would Amy call herself sentimental, but she does have to admit that there’s something satisfying to finally living out a moment she’s played out in her head a thousand times. Surprisingly enough, her heart’s not pounding, and her palms aren’t sweaty. She’s not nervous in the slightest. This feels...inevitable, somehow, like the natural culmination of whatever’s been going on between Amy and her boss since they met almost a decade ago. There’s not really much left to chance.

“I could fuck you,” says Amy, nonchalantly as if she’s proposing a coffee run. “If it would help.”

Selina is quiet for a moment, but Amy doesn’t worry. “I could get behind that,” she says, eventually, breaking a silence that wouldn’t have gotten uncomfortable had it stretched on for hours. “As long as you’re okay with it.”

“What else is a campaign manager for?” asks Amy, and Selina snorts. “I feel like you should call Mark first, though.”

“You’re probably right.” Selina pulls her phone out of her pocket, scrolls through her contacts, and taps the one labelled “Man.” (Amy has to suppress a snort of laughter at that.) They share a look as the other line clicks, conspiratorial in the way of teen girls at a sleepover planning the humiliation of an oblivious boy who’d wronged them. The first tone rings out.

Overcome by a sudden wave of boldness, Amy takes Selina’s face in her hands, leans in, and kisses her on the lips.

Selina is a little surprised at first, Amy can feel it in the tenseness of her mouth, but it only takes a second or two for her to loosen up and kiss Amy back, tilting her head and smiling slightly as Amy runs her tongue along her teeth. It’s nice— not as earth-shattering as you might expect the first kiss after ten years of crushing to be, but nice. At least until what’s-his-name— Mark— picks up the phone.

“Hello?” Amy hears, and jerks back suddenly from Selina. “Hello, Selina?”

“Mark!” says Selina, bringing the phone quickly to her ear and placing a finger over her grinning lips with a glance at Amy. _Be quiet_. Well, Amy can do that much for her.

With one smooth motion Amy throws her leg over Selina’s lap and lifts her body so that she’s straddling her. Selina wrinkles her nose, but doesn’t move to stop her. “Hi, Mark,” she says, completely composed, as Amy starts to roll her hips on top of her. “Things are fine. No, I don’t want to come over on Tuesday. I need to talk to you.”

Looking down at Selina is intoxicating. Amy knows, objectively, that the Vice Presidency is a basically powerless position; Selina had made much more of an impact as Senator. But there’s something about the title, and all the bells and whistles it comes with— the fancy office, the halls of the Capitol, all that— that negates all of that emptiness. It’s ridiculous, Amy knows, but she feels so _powerful_ with Selina looking up at her, smiling as Amy leans down to kiss her neck. There’ll be time to be embarrassed about it later.

“I’m assuming you saw the story in the Post,” says Selina as Amy sucks on the soft skin where her neck meets her shoulder, tugging down the collar of her dress for better access. “Yes, I know they asked you for comment. Did you talk to any of them?” A pause. “Well, that’s good. Thank you.”

Amy pulls back to admire her work. The mark on Selina’s neck is dark purple, pink around the edges— intense, but nowhere it could be seen beneath her clothes. The whole point of this is for Amy to be conscientious about image. Selina glances down at it, then up at Amy, and grins.

“Listen, Mark, I’ve got something to tell you.” Selina hesitates, and Amy mouths Do it at her, commanding in a way that sends adrenaline rushing through her blood. Selina nods, and Amy feels her steel herself. “I want to end it, with you.”

It takes a while, to get the poor idiot to accept that he’s being dumped. Selina, to her credit, is far more patient than normal, though that might have something to do with her focus on keeping her voice steady as Amy kisses her neck and cheeks, pulls her dress down to her waist and leaves marks on every inch of skin she can get away with. Stress-relieving indeed. By the time Selina’s gotten him to accept that it’s over, Amy’s got her bra mostly off, and her hand down her boss’s underwear. Despite the level calm of her voice on the phone, Selina is absolutely soaking wet.

“All right, Mark. Yeah, I will. Thank you.” And, _finally_ , she’s off the phone

“Well,” says Amy, sliding a finger inside Selina, “that could have gone worse.”

“Would have, if not for you,” says Selina, letting her head fall back against the couch. “Isn’t it weird that I find this calming?”

“A little,” says Amy. “Want more?”

“Please,” Selina sighs, and Amy adds two more fingers. “Oh, that’s nice. Could you rub my clit?”

Amy does so. “Good?”

“Very,” says Selina, and her voice is a little breathier than normal. “Oh, Amy—”

“You like that?” Amy murmurs, voice low as she can get it without sounding like she’s intentionally imitating Jonah— oh, _Jesus_ , that’s a libido killer.

“Something wrong?” asks Selina, voice unsteady, as she moves her hips up against Amy’s weight on her lap.

“Nothing,” says Amy firmly, and gets back to work.

It doesn’t take very long, all told, to make Selina come— maybe something about Amy knowing her so well in every other sense translates to sex. Veep-whispering has its uses, maybe, outside of the gloriously terrible rat-race that they’ve devoted their sorry lives to. Selina yells as she finishes, loud enough to make Amy thankful that the office is by design basically soundproof. She doesn’t need to hear about this from Jonah.

“My God, Amy,” groans Selina, slumping back against the pillows as Amy pulls out of her and slides off her lap onto the couch beside her. “What do they _teach_ you at Wellesley?”

“I always thought Smith was supposed to be the gay Seven Sisters school,” says Amy, wiping her fingers on the fabric cover of the cushion. “At Wellesley everyone’s, like, too uptight and repressed to learn how to fuck a woman well.”

“Mm.” Selina slowly begins to put her clothes back on, and Amy stares up at the ceiling. She’d thought there might be some kind of euphoric high, after sex she’d been dreaming about for almost a decade, but...no. Just the kind of satisfied delight she always gets from being useful to Selina. Doing her bidding, solving her problems, cleaning up her messes— and now getting her off, apparently. There was probably some deep-rooted psychological cause for all of it, how she felt about Selina, how she spent her life chasing after the high of utility to her specifically, but she’d had five hours of sleep and her neck was sore as hell and— oh, God, she still had that fucking _website_ to finish. She silently prayed Selina wasn’t in the mood for pillow talk.

Apparently there was a God, because once Selina had done up the back of her dress she turned to Amy and asked, “How do I look?”

“Vice presidential,” said Amy, though her boss’s hair was a little fluffier than normal and her lip stain had smudged ever so slightly.

“Good.” Selina stood, slid her heels back on, and did that little shoulder-squaring shake she’d do whenever she needed to go out and face the music. “Can you make sure everything’s in order with that press conference? And get Sue to schedule me an interview on one of the talk shows tomorrow morning.”

“Any particular preference?” asks Amy, standing up and combing her fingers through her hair.

“Whatever’s got the biggest viewership. Except _Morning Joe_ , I can’t _stand_ that little fucker.”

“Got it,” says Amy, grinning to herself. “You think we should have custodial change those cushion covers?”

Selina grins evilly. “No. Congressman Furlough’s coming in for a meeting tomorrow morning.”

“Noted,” says Amy, and follows her boss out the office doors.

 

* * *

 

SCANDAL, SEXISM, SEVERANCE

Meyer Cuts Ties With Miller Aide, Calls Affair “Indiscretion”

By Harriet Gorse

5:00 PM EST

After the explosive news of Vice President Selina Meyer’s affair with a Liberty Caucus staffer broke early this morning, Meyer has swiftly removed herself from the relationship, calling it an “indiscretion” that she was “foolish to engage in.”

In a press conference this afternoon, Meyer admitted that she was in the wrong in pursuing a relationship with Mark Huntington, the chief of staff for Congressman Henry Miller (R-IA), stating that she in no way supports Miller’s “abhorrent” views on civil rights legislation. However, Meyer stated that Huntington “made clear to me that he does not share his employer’s opinions and finds them personally repulsive,” an allegation which, if substantiated, could prove deeply destructive to Rep. Miller. (Huntington could not be reached for comment.)

While admitting that the affair was a bad decision, Meyer criticized the intense media attention on her personal life, stating that it was disproportional to the actual importance of the story and reflected the increased scrutiny of women in the public eye. “My sex life is not the Post’s to police,” said Meyer, and remarked on the sexism of over-reporting such events. (Josh Haverford, who broke the original story, declined to comment for this article.)

Meyer’s party has largely accepted her apology. DNC Chairman Luke Lopez called it “a model recognition of wrongdoing.” Amy Brookheimer, Meyer’s chief of staff, said “It was an unfortunate incident, but I know Selina very well and I think she’s learned her lesson. I’m proud of her for the way she’s handled this.”

**Author's Note:**

> to irenesides: hey! thanks for the great prompt, and the opportunity to write for a ship that in my opinion doesn't get nearly enough love. hope you enjoy!  
> to everyone else: it ought to be pretty obvious to the americans in the audience, but the liberty caucus is based on the freedom caucus, and congressman miller is based on steve king, in the spirit of veep being a pretty close but not exact analogue to real life. the seven sisters stereotypes mentioned are based on the experience of the author, who attends wellesley. this is set sometime during season one.


End file.
